The New YorkerModify

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter.

The Washington Roundtable discusses Vice-President J. D. Vance’s week on the world stage: stumping for the Kremlin-aligned Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán and being tasked with leading American negotiations in Pakistan to resolve the war with Iran, a conflict he reportedly opposed. The panel explores the events and people that shaped Vance, and how his political evolution toward MAGA may not be enough to make him the Republican Presidential nominee in 2028. “Anyone who comes after Trump is going to have a really hard time inheriting a cult of personality and turning that back into a party,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Vance is “not this kind of charismatic movement leader.”

This week’s reading:

“The Costs of Trump’s Iran-War Folly,” by Susan B. Glasser

“Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran,” by David Remnick

“The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election,” by Kapil Komireddi

“A U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Is Here, but Trump’s Stone Age Mentality Endures,” by Ishaan Tharoor

“How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics,” by Antonia Hitchens

“Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped,” by Isaac Chotiner

“An Economist’s Quest to Solve America’s Wage Problem,” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The popular video game The Exit 8, published, in 2023, by the Japanese indie developer Kotake Create, is what aficionados call a “walking simulator,” and what I’d call elegantly minimalist existential horror. You, the player, amble through an eerily underpopulated subway station, which gradually comes to resemble a metro-themed infinity loop—a maddeningly repetitive circle of mid-transit hell. Fear may thrive in the shadows, but here, under bright fluorescent lights, the terror feels even more malevolent, something ambient and inescapable. A yellow sign overhead points in the direction of Exit 8, but no matter how far you go, Exit 8 stubbornly refuses to appear. A man walks toward and then past you—and he will pass you again and again, the same man, in the same corridor, with only the scantest variation each time. He’s proof that you are stuck in a simulation, one that is either experiencing an unfortunate glitch or operating exactly as the devils in charge had hoped.

It’s probably a good thing that I hadn’t played the game before seeing “Exit 8,” a fiendishly clever feature-length adaptation by the director Genki Kawamura, who wrote the script with Kentaro Hirase. The movie, which runs ninety-five minutes, is sleek and precise, but, compared with the economy of the source, it’s almost a maximalist affair. At the outset, we share the perspective of someone who is identified only as the Lost Man (played by the pop star and actor Kazunari Ninomiya). As he listens to music and scrolls on his phone aboard a crowded subway train, we see what he sees and, just as crucially, hear what he hears: when an angry commuter yells at a mother to silence her crying infant, the Lost Man looks away and turns up his music. Exiting the train, he gets a call from an ex-girlfriend, who announces that she’s pregnant with his child and asks what he plans to do. He has what appears to be a panic-induced asthma attack, fumbles for his inhaler—and keeps walking.

With this narrative armature established, the game can begin. Soon, the Lost Man is navigating a telltale maze of white mosaic-tiled walls, where that Exit 8 sign looms into view; he is stranded in the underground purgatory, and so are we. At this point, the director of photography, Keisuke Imamura, ditches the rigid first-person P.O.V. in favor of a more traditional shooting style, allowing us to see the Lost Man, our avatar, moving in the frame; most of the action is composed in long takes of a flowing, sinuous elegance, which convey the sensation, by turns pleasurable, frightening, and paradoxical, of moving continuously through a contained space. It’s hard not to think of the gliding tracking shots in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980) as an inspiration, even before a wall of murky water comes surging at us from around the corner, like Kubrick’s tidal wave of blood.

The rules of this netherworld announce themselves, early on, via a nondescript wall sign. “Do not overlook any anomalies,” it says. “If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately.” An anomaly, the Lost Man realizes, can be a visual, aural, or situational discrepancy of any kind: a light fixture tilted at a bizarre angle, a door that swings open without warning. Every time he confirms that the corridor is anomaly-free and keeps walking—or recognizes a deviation from the usual pattern and retreats in the opposite direction—he is rewarded with a marker of progress: a sign that reads “0,” then “1,” then “2,” leading, presumably, all the way up to the elusive “8.” If he makes a mistake, his progress resets to “0” and the whole Sisyphean ordeal reboots. We scarcely need reminding that “8” is an upright infinity symbol.

The Lost Man is trapped, then, in something of a hybrid puzzle: an escape room by way of a diabolical memory test. Kawamura and the production designer Ryo Sugimoto have tweaked and expanded upon the game’s spare visual elements, updating, among other objects, the wall posters where several of the trickiest anomalies lie. One poster is now a print of M.C. Escher’s “Möbius Strip II,” which depicts nine red ants marching up and down an endless loop of metal; like the strains of Ravel’s “Boléro” that play over the film’s opening and closing moments, the image is meant to place us in a suitably circular frame of mind.

These are thematically on-the-nose gestures, but Kawamura, unlike the game’s creators, doesn’t place a premium on subtlety—or, for that matter, interactivity. As audience members, we are, of course, watching the Lost Man figure out clues and then choose whether to go forward or backward, rather than making those decisions for ourselves. For all that, there’s no loss in engagement. Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

It wasn’t until after I’d seen Kawamura’s movie—and idly played a few rounds of The Exit 8 on my phone—that I fully appreciated the extent and nature of that subversion. Some of it has to do with the understated grace of Ninomiya’s performance as the Lost Man, whose gentleness of spirit, even under anxiety and duress, rang a distant bell. (It took me a moment to recognize him as the actor who played Saigo, an untested, good-hearted Second World War soldier, in Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” from 2006.) But there are other deviations as well. The Lost Man isn’t the only one who assumes control of the film’s narrative, which is divided into three chapters, each centered on a different figure. One of them is the aforementioned passerby in the corridor, known here as the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who, far from being just a phantom projection, winds up embarking on his own tragic adventure.

To reveal more would be unwise. Suffice to say that “Exit 8” toys with a variation on the Fregoli delusion, in which a person comes to suspect that the people around them constitute a single malign entity. (The concept of the Fregoli was vividly explored in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s aptly titled “Anomalisa.”) Within the parameters of a game—where non-player characters essentially function as different disguises for, and manifestations of, a single narrative engine—such paranoia might not be unjustified. But in Kawamura’s telling, at least two of the N.P.C.s turn out to possess an individual consciousness. The effect is to nudge “Exit 8” closer to the physical, analog world, the one where the strangers around us are flesh-and-blood creatures with dreams, desires, stories, and sufferings of their own. These include the unnamed, dark-suited metro passengers we see at the start, many of whom stare silently ahead or down at their phones. Some of them, you imagine, might be playing a game of their own.

“Exit 8” is thus an indictment of social apathy and bystander syndrome; the film, most of which takes place in a maze of underground tunnels, warns us not to succumb to a more metaphorical kind of tunnel vision. It also argues, with unapologetic sincerity, for the special care and protection of children, and implies that those who abandon the most vulnerable among us are worthy of extreme—perhaps even eternal—punishment. It scarcely seems coincidental that the Lost Man gets lost shortly after failing to stand up for a mother and her baby, and just as he’s confronted with his own crisis of impending parenthood. Kawamura makes the point explicit late in the proceedings, with a hallucinatory outdoor sequence that briefly removes us from the train station altogether—easily the story’s most glaring structural and stylistic anomaly. Was it this scene’s earnest ode to the beauty of fatherhood or the sheer sensory relief of a breach in the claustrophobic mise en scène that pushed me over the edge into tears? Perhaps it was simply the way it underscores the film’s most poignant and perplexing contradiction. To reject any anomaly, anything mysterious or unusual, Kawamura suggests, is to succumb to a soul-crushing, self-serving conformity—and to withhold possibilities of decency, discovery, and love that make any game worth playing, life very much included. ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

At the end of February, OpenAI’s C.E.O., Sam Altman, made headlines by swiftly cutting a deal with the Pentagon for his company to replace Anthropic, which had balked at the Trump Administration’s bid to use its A.I. technology to power autonomous weapons and aid in mass surveillance. Days earlier, Altman had publicly supported Anthropic’s position in the dispute. Altman’s rise to power and his founding of OpenAI were predicated on placing safety above other concerns in developing artificial general intelligence. Why did he change his stance on such a fundamental issue? The New Yorker writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke with Altman multiple times and interviewed more than a hundred people for their investigation into the leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world, comparing Altman to J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although there is no smoking gun in Altman’s hand, the writers find that persistent allegations about his conduct underscore the danger of entrusting him to wield such vast power over the future.

Further reading:

• “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz
• “The Dangerous Paradox of A.I. Abundance,” by John Cassidy
• “The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser,” by Kyle Chayka

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

Youth is relative: thirty-four may be young for a politician, but it is not, actually, all that young. On the ninety-first day of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, a group of five truly young New Yorkers convened in a physics classroom at the Bronx High School of Science—Mamdani’s alma mater—to discuss his time in office so far. It was April 1st, the last day before spring break, and outside, a humid warmth that would be foul in July was, for now, novel and welcome.

“One of my memories of being at Science,” Mamdani told me a few days later, “was being surrounded by people smarter than myself, and that is something I continue to have the privilege of experiencing each and every day at City Hall.” Bronx Science is one of the highly competitive specialized New York City public high schools where access to a free, élite education rests on a single admissions test. As such, it is at once a symbol of the city’s grandest opportunities (because anyone can take that test and, if they score well enough, attend) and of its most entrenched inequalities (because this process routinely results in student populations with far lower percentages of Black and Latino students than in the public-school system as a whole). Mamdani, who graduated in 2010, seemingly sees it both ways. He has criticized the admissions test as a mechanism that perpetuates educational segregation. But he has also described Bronx Science as the place where his understanding of the city expanded beyond his parents’ Ivy League milieu, where he made friends with kids from similar immigrant backgrounds and became “proud of [his] brownness,” as he once put it in a podcast interview. The school “introduced me to the breadth of life across New York City,” he told me.

Throughout the 2025-26 school year, the Mayor had enjoyed the status of a home-town hero on campus. “I really think there’s very few places that have as much support for him as the Bronx Science student body,” Cooper, an animated junior in a polo shirt, told me that day in the physics classroom. “Everyone felt this pride toward him.” Students found the scale of Mamdani’s ambition exciting in itself. “He’s advocating for this progress that I feel like we haven’t seen in politics,” Cooper went on. “At least in our, like, remembered lifetime. Which is kind of sad to say.”

“I do have to agree with Cooper,” Kyle, the sole senior in the group, said. “Before him, I always felt like the world was unchangeable. Like, this is the way things are; we have to follow this structure.” Mamdani’s unexpected electoral triumph had called such received wisdom into question.

Scattered on the classroom whiteboards were equations, a few desultory doodles, a thunderhead cloud of cramped A.P. U.S. History notes about the Spanish-American War (“Progressivism → idk”), and, written in Japanese, “I like Stray Kids,” referring to a K-pop boy band. Shelves of small cacti under grow lights filled one window. Joan, a junior in glasses with thick black frames, said that he was impressed with Mamdani’s 2-K and 3-K efforts. Child care was something that his parents had worried about after arriving from the Dominican Republic. “I know a lot of family and friends who would have really benefitted from a program like that,” he said.

Mariam, a junior, wore a loosely draped black head scarf. She said that she liked the degree to which Mamdani seemed immersed in New York’s daily life. “The fact that he took the subway,” she said. “Isn’t this guy supposed to be in a limousine?” Her commute involved taking the 2 train to the 4, with a transfer at 149th Street, a stop that she called “a red flag to transit New Yorkers,” because “drug use is extremely prevalent”—something she hoped Mamdani could address.

There were knowing nods from the rest of the group regarding 149th Street. Namira, another junior, said that she didn’t take public transportation very much, in part because of her parents’ safety concerns.

Namira, whose dark hair had burgundy streaks, wore hoop earrings and a tangle of gold necklaces. “My parents are really supportive of Mamdani, because I come from similar religious and cultural backgrounds,” she said. “I’m Bengali.” Namira lives in East Elmhurst, where several bus stops had recently been removed, disrupting her mother’s commute to Times Square and inspiring her to action. “My mom has a history of not being trusting of politicians in general,” Namira said. “But recently she took the liberty of e-mailing Mamdani.” Namira’s mother often asks her children to copy-edit her e-mails. This time, Namira said, “We made her send it as it was, because we just thought it added to the factor of, like, Mamdani would understand.”

The Mayor was, the group agreed, someone who they could easily imagine as a Bronx Science student. To judge by the present company, this meant ambitious and busy. The students had a dense roster of extracurriculars among them: student government; debate; Model U.N.; National Honor Society; newspaper; and groups that, variously, opposed bullying, promoted restorative justice, and provided test prep. Namira hoped eventually to study journalism and international relations. Cooper, a self-described “well-rounded student,” professed an interest in education policy; previously, he had worked for the Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres.

As the students held forth on community, diversity, and under-resourced schools, they all sounded slightly as though they were running for something, however yet undefined. They spoke like people who were accustomed to being evaluated, and accepted it with good humor. The ordeal of admissions was still present in the minds of upperclassmen, as was the fact of Stuyvesant, the public-high-school Harvard to Bronx Science’s Yale. Mamdani, for one, has admitted that he didn’t get into Stuyvesant. (“Mamdani plans to convert Stuyvesant High School into a government-owned mixed-use building,” the Stuyvesant Spectator reported, in a humor piece.)

Cooper volunteered that he’d ranked Bronx Science as his first choice, against his parents’ wishes. “They wanted me to go to Stuyvesant,” he said.

“Similar to Cooper, I did choose Bronx Science over Stuyvesant,” Kyle noted.

Mariam explained that she’d been admitted to Bronx Science through a program called Discovery, for students from disadvantaged backgrounds whose test scores fell just below the school’s cutoff line. “I got that e-mail—I was, like, wow, the school must really want me to come here,” she said. Her story was a reminder that the school’s promise and its limitations were difficult to disentangle.

First-year politicians and élite high-school students have something in common. They both have gotten what they want—they got in!—only to find that the hard work begins all over again. Mamdani’s freshman year in office has barely started, but, as anyone who’s been a high schooler knows, four years can go by shockingly fast. On the way to the next goal—reëlection, college admission—both groups must clear a series of hurdles made up of largely artificial deadlines and events: a press conference, a ribbon cutting, a semester, or, for a mayoral administration, the first hundred days.

Such deadlines lend themselves to compressed frenzies of activity. On day ninety-seven, Mamdani walked home to Gracie Mansion from City Hall, evoking his walk down the length of Manhattan just before the primary. As his ninety-eighth day in office became his ninety-ninth, he’d visit overnight work sites in Queens, an all-hours show of appreciation for city workers that called to mind the late nights and early mornings that he spent cheering on Department of Sanitation crews during winter snowstorms. (The administration was young but possibly capable of nostalgia already.) The Mayor would round out his first hundred days with a celebratory rally at the Knockdown Center on Sunday (day a hundred and two). In the meantime, a flurry of press releases read like self-issued report cards attesting that he was a pleasure to have in office. But his hope, he said, was to use the hundred-day mark to call attention to the “often unrecognized” labor of the municipal workforce. “The position of being the mayor comes with a platform,” he told me. “The reality is that you are only able to accomplish things because of the team that is around you.”

So, between 11:00 P.M. Wednesday night and 1:00 A.M., his motorcade prowled Queens. In the ambulance bay at Elmhurst Hospital, Fire Department emergency workers were waiting for calls. On Exit 4 of Jackie Robinson Parkway, a Department of Transportation road crew was repaving an on-ramp. And, on a quiet residential street in St. Albans, a team from the Department of Environmental Protection was using equipment that it compared to a stethoscope to check for subterranean water leaks. At each location, the Mayor, wearing a departmentally appropriate windbreaker and an expression that conveyed indefatigably active listening, asked city workers how many years they’d been on the job. Cameras bobbed and staffers thronged. (“He rolls pretty deep,” I overheard the F.D.N.Y. commissioner, Lillian Bonsignore, observe.)

In St. Albans, a bus driver leaving home to start her shift at the Queens Village Depot was shocked to find the Mayor standing in the middle of her street. “I told him thank you for coming about the water,” she explained, after they’d chatted for a moment and posed for a photo.

At Elmhurst, a resident in a Tufts University School of Medicine zip-up wandered out to see what was going on. “I went to Bowdoin,” he said, watching from the periphery as the Mayor inspected an ambulance. “Two years behind him.”

In Forest Park, Exit 4 vibrated underfoot as a steamroller advanced. The pavement was sticky if you stood in one place for too long. Mamdani (hard hat in place, D.O.T. windbreaker on) climbed aboard the truck responsible for spreading asphalt. For a while, he stood listening, as he’d been doing all night, to someone’s account of a job they’d had longer than he’d had his own.

“All right, let’s do it,” the Mayor said, preparing to take the driver’s seat.

The truck rumbled, and an operating engineer stationed at his side shouted the news down to the crowd gathered on the steaming pavement below: “THE MAYOR IS DOIN’ IT.” ♦

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his Presidency, posed an emergency to both his country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s abandonment of that deal, in 2018. For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known. ♦